Giorgio Buccellati 2012

Marco De Pietri – November 2019

“The Floodwaters of Urkesh and the Structural Coherence of the Urkesh Temple Complex,”
in P. Quenet and M. al-Maqdissi (eds.), “L’Heure immobile”. Entre Ciel et Terre. Mélanges en l’honneur d’Antoine Souleiman, Subartu 31, pp. 21-33.
See text [Academia.edu]

The Temple Terrace at Urkesh [see here an overview] is indeed one of the most striking structures at Tell Mozan.

In the introduction (paragraph 1), the author presents the structural coherence of the Temple Terrace (sub-paragraph 1), the ‘built environment’, underlining the function of the Plaza, JP (sub-paragraph 1.2) and the role of ancient floodwaters which led ancient inhabitants to build protective structures as the revetment wall investigated in J2, J5 and J6 (sub-paragraph 1.3).

Paragraph 2 displays the structural configuration of the monumental structure: the Western side of the Palace fronting the Plaza (sub-paragraph 2.1), the Northwest closure (sub-paragraph 2.2) and the Eastern rim (sub-paragraph 2.3); sub-paragraph 2.4 describes some peculiar architectural features of the structure, i.e. its centrality and asymmetry, while sub-paragraph 2.5 includes these buildings in a ‘Northern template’, retracing the structure of the whole complex in some Anatolian or Transcaucasian models, but also including Southern (i.e. Mesopotamian) influences.

Paragraph 3 focuses on the bi-millennial continuity of the complex, displaying the situation (both structural and functional) of the structures in both the fourth millennium BC (sub-paragraph 3.1), through the third millennium BC until the Mittanian period (sub-paragraph 3.2), reaching also ‘modern aftermaths’ (sub-paragraph 3.3), describing some damages occurred on the structures in 2009-2010 (winter), “when the floodwaters broke some of our defences in the Temple area” (p. 10).

Paragraph 4 lists the captions for the figures illustrating the different architectural components of the Temple Terrace [see following pages for the pictures].

[About the Temple Terrace, see also Buccellati, F. 2010, Buccellati, F. 2014, Buccellati, G. 2010, Buccellati and Kelly-Buccellati 2005, Buccellati and Kelly-Buccellati 2009 and Buccellati and Kelly-Buccellati 2014].